Alex Little

As I mentioned last week, there is now a generator for our building and I’m sure that you’ve all been waiting to see a photo! So here’s the little hut which houses our shiny new generator:

In our server room there’s some shiny new equipment too, to help control the new generator:

All of this new equipment was installed by Chinese contractors (on behalf of ETC – the Ethiopian Telecoms Co) a couple of weeks ago and includes a network connection upgrade (to 2.5Gbps so I’m told) for the link between the two main University campuses.

The tall rack on the right is for managing the switch over from grid power to generator power, plus it contains a stack of UPSs. The server rack on the left is currently empty, but will soon contain (if you’d not already guessed by the posting title)… a video-conferencing system server.

So… why the does the university need a video-conferencing system? I really have no idea and I’ve not heard any good reasoning as to why it’s needed. I’m sure the money could be better spent on other ICT facilities for staff and students. But there does seem to be a slight obsession (maybe too strong) in Ethiopia with video-conferencing, for example the Woreda-Net project which links up all the Ethiopian woredas via video conferencing over VSAT.

I also found from my recent survey that over 10% of students felt that video-conferencing would be in the top 3 online activities that would help improve their studies. I’m not sure what these (all campus based) students think they will gain from video-conferencing.

I’m quite happy to be proved wrong about all this, but in my experience in the UK video-conferencing is not commonly used or required, so I have little belief that here will be any different. If anyone has any good arguments or reasoning as to why it would be a great benefit here then please let me know.